Retrieving Origins and the Claim of Multiculturalism

Antonio Lopez, Javier Prades, Antonio Lopez, Javier Prades

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780802869906
• eBook ISBN: 9781467442176
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion, Politics & State

This book explores the philosophical, legal, and theological roots of Western multiculturalism, that is, the encounter and coexistence of different cultures within a liberal society. Rather than concerning themselves with the particulars of cultural dialogue, the authors of this volume go deeper and question the very reality of "multiculturalism" itself.
As a whole the volume devotes attention to the origins of human nature, arguing that regardless of how different another person or culture seems to be, universal human experience discloses what it means to be human and to relate to others and to God. The contributors represent different cultures and faith traditions but are united in friendship and in the conviction that the Christian faith enables an authentic approach to long-standing debates on multiculturalism.
Contributors:

• Massimo Borghesi
• Francesco Botturi
• Marta Cartabia
• Carmine Di Martino
• Pierpaolo Donati
• Costantino Esposito
• Stanley Hauerwas
• Antonio Lopez
• Francisco Javier Martínez Fernandez
• John Milbank
• Javier Prades
• David L. Schindler
• Angelo Cardinal Scola
• Lorenza Violini
• Joseph H. H. Weiler

Part III

The Recognition of God
as the Ultimate Ground

Church, Modernity, and Multiculturalism:
An Extemporaneous Reflection

Francisco Javier Martínez Fernández

In this brief essay I would like to propose the following idea (albeit in a simplified and therefore necessarily inadequate way): a Church that understands itself and reality through the prevailing categories of secular modernity (whether in their postmodern or Enlightenment form, or merely constituted as reactions to either of these) is doomed to disappear.1 Or at any rate, it will undergo such a metamorphosis that its continuity with “historical” Christianity would be broken (indeed, it has in part already been broken). By “historical” Christianity I mean the sacred Tradition that originated with the incarnation of the Word, as recounted by the New Testament and Church Fathers, and which is also found in the living magisterium of the Church. Moreover, a Church that uses secular categories is incapable of having a productive and sincere encounter with people of other religious and cultural traditions. To the extent that it adapts itself to the categories of secular modernity, it takes on the precise role that modernity assigns to it; insofar as it embraces this role, the Church can only dissolve, or else be an instrument of violence and division. In order to meet every man and every woman in a way that allows all of us — Christians and non-­Christians — to grow in our common humanity, the Church must free itself from the categories of modernity and recover its identity from within its own particular Tradition.

The Church and Culture

The Church is influenced by the culture in which it lives. This assertion does not imply any dualism, as though the Church were a pure “being” in and of itself, more or less contaminated by history and culture conceived as elements external to it.2 The Church only exists in concrete cultural forms, on which the encounter with Christ — which from the beginning has always occurred in a concrete cultural form — has had varying degrees of impact. This encounter can be the determining factor of the human experience, or it can remain merely a partial or marginal aspect thereof. The task of Christian education consists entirely in helping people pass from the latter condition to the former. For people in the latter situation, the categories determining Christian life continue to be those of the surrounding culture. And those categories will influence and weigh on the thought of individuals and peoples depending on how decisive the encounter with the Risen and Living Christ, Center and Lord of the cosmos and of history, has been in determining their self-­awareness and awareness of reality.

The Church has always lived with this tension. Christ’s disciples were Jews, more or less influenced by Hellenistic culture, and they expressed their experience within that context. But for centuries afterward, the Church had to deal with the serious issues that arose from its spreading within the Hellenistic world, and, from very early on, even to the towns located on the outskirts or beyond the borders of that world. This situation has been repeated every time the Church has come into contact with other cultures over the course of history. In each of these encounters, the tension between cultural categories and the encounter with Christ has manifested itself in a unique and unrepeatable way that can only be understood empirically.

Modernity and Postmodernity: Two Variations

How is this tension expressed in our time? Today, as a result of the widespread dissemination of the Enlightenment, the dominant culture (of the West, at least) has two basic variations: the modern, which is increasingly just official rhetoric, but which does continue to have a certain amount of influence (and for this reason continues to be invoked in certain contexts); and the postmodern, which is, on the one hand, the rejection of Enlightenment modernity — or the disenchantment resulting from its unfulfilled promises — and, on the other hand, the intensification thereof. The true culture of our countries tends to be an amalgam of heterogeneous elements of these two variations, mixed together in varying proportions, depending on the case. And if it is true, as MacIntyre and others have convincingly argued, that the Enlightenment inevitably leads to nihilism, then it is also true that often the reaction against the vertigo brought on by the nihilist deconstruction of all desire for moral or intellectual coherence is nothing more than a return to the Enlightenment. This creates a strange, vicious cycle, making it very difficult to escape the complicated place in which we find ourselves, or even to imagine a true alternative.

The greatest difference between modernity and postmodernity as they concern Christianity is that the residually Christian environment in which Kant and Hegel lived allowed them to continue thinking that Christianity was the highest possible form of humanity, and that its “essence” could still be — and perhaps had to be — saved for modern man. Modern man, however, because he was able to behave ethically by simply following the dictates of “pure reason,” lacked any “supernatural” attachments. He could also reinterpret Christian dogma symbolically. But for the postmodern man, Christianity — if he thinks about it at all — is nothing more than one supermarket product (and not even necessarily from the religious supermarket) among many, no more or less interesting than all the others.

Leaving the distinction between modern and postmodern cultures aside — though I do not claim that it is unimportant — the view of Christianity is fundamentally the same in both variations of secular culture: Christianity is a subset of the “religion” category, and this fact clearly sets it apart from other spheres of human activity such as rational knowledge, work and art, the economy, ethics, and politics. Because it is “religion,” it is assigned certain characteristics so that it will fit into the term’s preexisting, modern definition: religion is, above all, a set of beliefs that are not rationally verifiable, and are therefore designated “religious sentiment” and assigned to the irrational realm of preference. They must remain tokens of a past culture fit only for a museum, or they must be contained within the private sphere. Because these beliefs are irrational and rigidly separated from the other spheres of human activity, they may not be guidelines for anything “real” that has social significance or value — whether politics, economics, or family life. In general, these beliefs are depicted in fixed ritual expressions established by tradition and are often used as the foundation for specific ethical codes. An ethical code will be “tolerated” as long as its members live it as a free, private choice: that is, as long as it is not imposed by any person or institution, and as long as it cannot interfere with other beliefs and other ethical systems. If religion and the ethical code derived from it sought to emerge from the strictly private realm or the realm of folklore, they would become sources of violence. The mission and duty of preventing this violence falls to the state, the supreme protector and guarantor of individual liberties and the common good.

With regard to religious beliefs themselves, there are two possibilities: either they are granted no value (beyond that of a nice museum piece), or, if they are granted some value, it is only as a pretext for or symbolic expression of something else, generally of some “ethical principles” that would be just as accessible to those who do not hold such beliefs. In this way, for example, Christian dogma, beginning with faith in the Holy Trinity and in Jesus Christ as the Incarnate Son of God, must be pushed aside as a contingent human construction. In order to fit into this framework, the New Testament must be reinterpreted in an attempt to explain how “the Christ of faith” came about from something that, in reality, did not originally contain such a concept. Of course, Jesus’ resurrection and his virgin birth are either kept quiet, or the question of their truth is camouflaged by clever or not-­so-­clever wordplay. Curiously, and as others have noted, the “historical Jesus” that we are offered in exchange is usually entirely anachronistic and not at all “historical,” and his existence seems to be determined by categories that, under rigorous scrutiny, turn out to be decidedly modern.

For Christians, therefore, accepting the theological premises of the Enlightenment means renouncing a strong Christology and ecclesiology, and usually a strong theology as well. It means, moreover, subordinating theology to ethics, and more specifically, to the ethical ideas specific to secular modernity. God’s existence can be acknowledged or denied, but when it is acknowledged, this God is certainly not the God of the religious traditions descended from Abraham, and of course is not the God of the Christian experience. Rather, this God is either the “watchmaker” god of modern deism, which is an idea so intellectually weak (e.g., with regard to the problems of evil and suffering) that it inevitably cancels itself out, or a more or less disguised version of cosmic pantheism, or even of that ancient polytheism that predated the emergence of Greek philosophy and Jewish monotheism (and that, e.g., attributes special “positive energy” to places and things).

As a result, in the dominant secular culture (naturally much less of a single entity than the term would imply), the Church does not have a space that can be recognized as deriving from its own Tradition. Secular modernity has room for only two absolutes (two religious elements, we might say, in the specifically modern sense of the word “religion”), both of which it created and are therefore largely considered legitimate even without justification: the individual, made up of his or her rights and freedoms, and the various forms of the state-­market duality. These various forms have been the ...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• Perceiving Otherness, Understanding Difference
• Ordering Social Life
• The Recognition of God as the Ultimate Ground
• Contributors
• Index of Persons